My mid-90s Dremel kicks ass.

That's on older Boeing jets (the ones named after the noise their tires make when falling off and hitting the tarmac... )

Airbus, and I believe the new Boeings, have outward opening emergency doors - they're heavier, harder to make right, require much more maintenance (look for double, triple, and thicker skins around Airbus doors the next time you board one...) but, if you're ever seated in the exit row when it really hits the fan, you want an outward opening door.

A *NEW* use. Not the same old use but online now.

NFC implementations (should) be interoperable unless somebody screwed up implementation to spec; but that promises nothing about compatibility for anything built on top of NFC.

Right now, ISO 7813 mag-stripe cards are nice and standardized; but that only gets you as far as having the reader hardware work. Whether your card will be accepted by a given vendor is an entirely separate matter governed by some ghastly pile of contractual arrangements.

By that time there were millions of slaves in the U.S. and as you pointed out, they reproduced and even resulted in a surplus for the larger plantations. There was a lively internal slave trade at that point.

Actually, the war on poverty was working until the GOP insisted on surrendering.

And yes, businesses that mooch on the taxpayer to supplement their inadequate payroll are evil. They know damned well they are mooching off of people with a lot less than they already have.

We don't claim the car thief is blameless if you leave your keys in your car, do we?

As timeOday said, they cost about 10 years wages for an equivalent free worker, so if the owner didn't keep them alive and well at least that long, it was a losing proposition.

So as despicable as the practice was, the modern practice is in some ways worse.

Ah, that's just because today's ultra-high-density platters require high-coercivity materials in order to adequately maintain the magnetization patterns that store the data. Low coercivity magnetic media just don't work at those densities.

That's the new innovation of forced labor. In the bad old days, slaves were quite expensive so you had to provide food, clothing, shelter, and at least minimal healthcare.

The new improved forced labor lets them pick up the slaves cheap, provide them minimal food and shelter and just let them die from overwork.

Very well might have been an L-1011, this was around 1994.

Both upsides were already easily solvable. Most distro's rc scripts already call a function to start a daemon. That could easily have called a helper program to set up the cgroup and register on dbus to act as a controller for the group.

Meanwhile, at least Debian's rc scripts already had dependencies listed in their headers that could be used to compute a start order. It could as easily be used to compute a makefile to start in parallel.

The problem is, now that the init process will be such a hairball of dependencies, it becomes harder to implement such solutions without seemingly unrelated bits breaking. For example, no reasonable person expects the GUI desktop to break if you switch out init. (and no reasonable person creates such a dependency)

Last DC-10 I flew on had a horrible vibration in the port side engine... not the plane's fault, I blame Delta, and thank my lucky stars that I made it from Miami to Atlanta without something serious happening on the left wing.

Inward opening doors just make sense to engineers.

Outward opening doors are the only rational answer when 35 people are pushing toward an exit in a panic.

No, it actually blows out an airplane - see: the Hawaii effect, metal fatigue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...